"Impossible!" cried the other, aghast as at some gratuitous indecency.

"Not in the sense you mean. Such advertising as benefits me
most is done for me by the snappiest copywriters in the business."

"I suppose you refer to Whitewash and Gilt?" said Mr. Gilbert wistfully.

"Not at all. The people who are doing my advertising are Stevenson,
Browning, Conrad and Company."

"Dear me," said the Grey-Matter solicitor. "I don't know that agency
at all. Still, I doubt if their copy has more pep than ours."

"I don't think you get me. I mean that my advertising is done
by the books I sell. If I sell a man a book by Stevenson or Conrad,
a book that delights or terrifies him, that man and that book become
my living advertisements."

"But that word-of-mouth advertising is exploded," said Gilbert.
"You can't get Distribution that way. You've got to keep your
trademark before the public."

"By the bones of Tauchnitz!" cried Mifflin. "Look here, you wouldn't go
to a doctor, a medical specialist, and tell him he ought to advertise
in papers and magazines? A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures.
My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me
tell you that the book business is different from other trades.
People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that
your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!